One of the most baffling and depressing realities of life in the digital (and now AI) world is the way young people resist books that challenge their worldview.

The problem is particularly bad among liberal, college-aged students. Now, with all the world’s literature available to download on a phone, students still resist reading books that might upset their ideology. They can explain the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, renounce colonialism, and expound on the history explored in The 1619 Project, but they don’t know who Whittaker Chambers was and have never read The Gulag Archipelago.

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When I was in college at Catholic University in the 1980s, you’d have to get on the metro and make a pilgrimage to an independent bookstore to read the stuff that was not on the official reading list — books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Jim Thompson’s Savage Night, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. We were eager to read things that the mainstream told us to ignore. The more politically incorrect, the better.

Things began to change in the 1990s, the early years of what would become the “wokeism” of the far Left. Suddenly, the classic authors that once were on the official reading list were being shoved aside for books that focused on race and gender. 

In 1991, just a couple of years after I graduated from college, Georgetown University announced that  a course in nineteenth-century American literature was being taught under the title “White Male Writers.” Hawthorne, Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, and Mark Twain were now exotically walled off in their own ghetto. Soon, they would be banished. The most decorated novelist of the 20th century was Saul Bellow. Who reads Bellow anymore? Not college students. It doesn’t help that Bellow was Jewish, and there is a toxic problem of anti-Semitism on campuses today.

What’s needed on American college campuses are conservative book clubs that can sneak contraband literature to woke students. In his absorbing new book The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, journalist Charlie English recounts the CIA’s covert Cold War operation to smuggle dissident literature in communist countries. The program was run by a CIA man named George Minden, who believed that literature could instill a desire for freedom as much as guns or bombs. Under CIA head Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, Minden clipped books by such writers as Orwell, Camus, and Solzhenitsyn. The CIA operation was codenamed QRHELPFUL.

Intellectual and political activist Adam Michnik read The Gulag Archipelago in prison. Michnik told English: “A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

Today, students have all the world’s books at their fingertips, yet most are shunning the kind of freedom we dreamt of in the 1980s in favor of self-censorship. Bookstores and the liberal media attempt to shut away or censor conservative books, often to a comical extreme.  

In his recent work, The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, Washington Post veteran reporter Carlos Lozada explains that his book is about other books. That is to say, Lozada reads all the books and other documents about Washington, including political memoirs, government documents, and Supreme Court decisions.

“I read histories and manifestos,” Lozada writes. “I peruse centuries-old essays and decades-old commission reports. I scour Supreme Court decisions and the text of the latest congressional investigations. I read many books about American politics, and, I must confess, I also read books by politicians and government officials.” Lozada reads campaign biographies, “revisionist memoirs,” the “tell-all books by mid-level administration staffers,” and books by “presidents, vice presidents, senators, chiefs of staff and FBI directors.”

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If it has anything to do with D.C., Lozada reads it. There is, however, one book Lozada won’t read, mine. In 2022, I published The Devil’s Triangle, a book about dramatic political events in Washington. It is set in D.C. and was written by me, a native of the city. The New York Times wouldn’t touch The Devil’s Triangle, leaving book reviewer Alexandra Jacobs to write, while reviewing another book that talks about me unfavorably, that she “longs for more about Mark Judge.”

That’s easy to rectify. Maybe we can smuggle a copy of The Devil’s Triangle to Alexandra behind the Iron Curtain of the Times.